Ghosts, Knowledge and Truth in Atwood: A Reader's Guide to Six Responses*

I have been deUghted and enUghtened by six responses to Return of Dead in Margaret Atwood's Surfacing and Alias Grace. The aim of present reply is to assist readers in finding their way around my essay and various comments and criticisms contained in responses. Thus I will first summarize how responses relate to my argument (contradiction, extension, elaboration, ...) and what their principal claims are. Then I will conclude with some remarks in defence of my views.My essay may be summed up as foUows. There are several ghosts in Surfacing, most notably narrator's parents and her child, whom she imagines to be living with her divorced husband. The narrator needs to confront these ghosts and to recover painful knowledge associated with them before she can be restored from her death-in-life state. Alias Grace shares many characteristics with earlier novel: detective plot, traumatisation of narrator, impact of this traumatisation on her memory, presence of ghosts, and ambivalent nature of these ghosts, who haunt protagonists but also help them to survive. Despite many similarities, there is one crucial difference between two novels. Whereas in Surfacing recovering knowledge of one's past has a salutary effect, survival of protagonist in Alias Grace depends on repression of such selfknowledge. It is not knowing truth that makes Grace free.While writers of responses have paid me very handsome compliments, none of them has extended her politeness so far as to actually agree with me on an important point. My reading of Alias Grace takes hypnosis scene in chapter 48 at face value: Grace is possessed by ghost of her friend Mary Whitney, who behaves like an alter in a case of dissociative identity disorder (or multiple personality); it is this being who seizes control of her body from time to time and who also participated in murder of Nancy Montgomery. Thus there is a solution to detective plot. While Grace herself remains ignorant of this solution, reader is in know. Many critics see this solution as merely one hypothesis among many others. On this view, difference between Surfacing and Alias Grace consists in a shift to postmodern scepticism and uncertainty: Alias Grace is a work of historiographical metafiction that emphasizes unknowability of history and offers many different versions of past without privileging any one of them.1 Margaret Rogerson devotes her response to a defence of this view against my reading. She points out that credentials of professional in charge of hypnosis, Dr DuPont alias Jeremiah peddler, do not inspire much confidence, and she argues that, in Alias Grace as well as in other works, Atwood plays role of a narrative trickster who uses the technique of uncertainty [and] challenges readers to come to conclusions but also problematizes whatever they invent (90).Like Rogerson, Janice Fiamengo reads Alias Grace along sceptical lines, arguing that [t]he ambiguities of hypnotism scene [...] are inextricable from narrative playfulness and skepticism that characterize novel as a whole (55). However, Fiamengo interestingly differs from Rogerson and from many other critics in that she takes a surprisingly dim view of this playful scepticism. In her comparison of two novels, she expresses a clear preference for earlier one. Surfacing, she argues, is an original and unorthodox novel out of step with cultural fashions of its day. It undermines Canadian antiAmericanism by revealing similarities between Canada and America, it is critical of sexual Uberation and of abortion, and it explores difficult moral and reugious themes such as evil, sin and redemption. Alias Grace, on other hand, conforms to Zeitgeist of mid-90s, for instance in its use of repressed memory syndrome, in its endorsement of female discursive empowerment, and in its somewhat simpUstic and unfavourable portrayal of Victorian male elite. …

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